Xcalibur Xc
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[Batman x Ironman] Ch: 104 [A Dawn Beyond Memory]
🕑 Added 2025-04-28 22:07:03 +0000 UTCThe Radion nukes detonated.
The entire dimension caved in on itself. The time loop shattered, but Bruce quickly used his Infinity power to recreate another time prison and teleport both far away from their present location.
The damage continued...
Planets vaporized. The sky screamed. Oceans of molten rock evaporated into dust. Darkseid roared as the Radion tore through his divine flesh, ripping at his very existence, but he did not fall.
He adapted.
Through sheer will, Darkseid stabilized what remained of his essence, compacting it into a dense, burning form. His armor was cracked and smoking. His body was bleeding divine ichor. Yet his eyes blazed even fiercer.
Bruce charged.
Faster than thought. Lightning exploding behind each step. His fists, empowered by the Tenfold Rings and enhanced strength, slammed into Darkseid's chest, each blow creating sonic booms that cracked the void.
Darkseid countered. His fist collided with Bruce’s jaw, sending him hurtling through fragments of a shattered moon. Before Bruce could recover, Darkseid was on him, a godly backhand smashing him into the molten ground, carving a deep trench across the broken realm.
Bruce spun mid-fall, landing in a crouch, blood trickling from his lip. He wiped it away.
Darkseid charged.
Bruce met him halfway.
Their fists collided. The shockwave shattered light itself, sending fractures through the sky. Bruce drove his knee into Darkseid's ribs, following up with a spinning kick to the temple. Darkseid stumbled, but retaliated with a brutal elbow to Bruce’s spine, making the Tenfold Armor groan under the pressure.
Bruce roared. "ARGGGG!!" His eyes flared red, twin beams of concentrated heat vision slashing across Darkseid’s wounded chest.
"DAMN YOU!" Darkseid screamed and countered with Omega beams, but Bruce dodged, moving faster than light, and shot energy blasts at Darkseid's eyes to prevent him from using his beams.
Bruce found an opening...
He blinked in and grabbed Darkseid's arm mid-strike and twisted, snapping the bone with a sickening crunch. Darkseid howled and countered with a headbutt that cracked Bruce's helmet.
"Kugggg!"
Bruce’s blood sprayed into the air. He blinked through the pain, his mind crystal clear. He released the hold and activated the Vortex boosters on his back, launching himself into the air and raining plasma-charged Radion blasts down onto Darkseid.
Explosions rocked the field. Each hit carved new burns into Darkseid’s armor, each explosion weakening him a fraction more.
But Darkseid did not stop.
He pushed through the firestorm, body ablaze, one hand clutching a crackling sphere of collapsed Omega energy. He hurled it with godlike strength.
Bruce barely raised his shields in time. The impact sent him crashing backward, the ground erupting under him.
He rolled to his feet, coughing blood, body screaming in protest.
Darkseid was breathing heavily now, but grinning.
"You’re weakening," Darkseid snarled. "You burn bright... but you will burn out."
Bruce growled deep in his chest.
Lightning exploded from his fists as he surged forward. He threw everything into his assault. Punches that dented dimensions. Kicks that ruptured gravitational fields. Blasts that would have annihilated entire solar systems.
Darkseid took them all, countering with brutal blows of his own. The battlefield trembled with every exchange.
Bruce twisted behind him, locking Darkseid’s arm, driving his knee into his spine with a sickening crack. Darkseid screamed and slammed his head backward, striking Bruce’s helmet, shattering more of the armor.
Bruce tried to fly away, but Darkseid caught him around the throat and slammed him into the asteroid so hard that shockwaves swept over the space, shattering everything in their way.
Bruce’s vision blurred. "Shit!"
Darkseid’s foot came down.
Bruce rolled aside. The stomp missed by inches, cracking the giant asteroid in half.
He rose, blood dripping from his mouth, his armor flickering, barely holding together.
Darkseid laughed.
"You gave me a fight, mortal," he growled, stepping forward. "But all flames... flicker and die."
Bruce's body screamed in agony. His Kryptonian cells were burning up. His muscles were torn. Bones cracked. Every system is nearing failure. His nanites were barely holding on. But this much was nothing.
"Flicker and die?" He stretched his arms and cracked fingers as the Infinity energy completely healed him. "Kid, I haven't even used 10% of my power. But well... I guess, it's time to amp it up a bit, huh?"
Bruce vanished...
Darkseid's eyes widened. He couldn't even detect Bruce's movements.
Bruce materialized behind Darkseid in an instant, faster than a thought, faster than instinct.
And he slapped him.
A brutal, open-handed bitch slap that cracked across Darkseid’s face like a thunderclap from the birth of the universe. The force was so absurd, so absolute, that it twisted Darkseid’s neck sideways and sent him stumbling two steps back.
The void itself recoiled.
The fractured sky above flickered, glitching in and out of existence.
Darkseid slowly turned his head back to face Bruce, a dark red welt already forming on his cheek.
His expression was pure rage. No words. Just the trembling of an ancient tyrant whose pride had been violated.
Bruce floated a few feet off the shattered ground, arms relaxed at his sides, his aura now something else entirely.
Infinity energy coursed through him, every cell vibrating at frequencies that bent time, matter, and reality.
The Living Tribunal’s seal behind him flared to life, golden rings spinning faster, radiating judgment into the dimension itself. His armor regenerated fully, gleaming with layered Radion veins, woven now with raw cosmic judgment. Then there was a shade of rainbow, shimmering around him due to the Infinity energy.
Bruce spoke, his voice layered, carrying the weight of law, the bite of vengeance, the warmth of life.
"You think you're inevitable," he said quietly.
He moved.
One strike to Darkseid’s ribs.
The impact was so vicious that chunks of divine armor and bone burst outward in a geyser of golden ichor.
Darkseid howled in agony.
Bruce was already moving again.
One punch to the sternum. One to the jaw. A knee to the gut that folded Darkseid over like a man broken by gravity itself.
"You think you can't lose," Bruce said, hammering another left hook into Darkseid’s temple.
Each hit carried amplified force.
The Power energy boiled in his veins.
The Space energy folded distance around his strikes.
The Time energy bent each blow to hit not just now, but half a second in the future and half a second in the past simultaneously.
The Mind energy sharpened every reaction to absolute precision.
The Soul energy anchored his existence beyond physical harm.
The Reality energy wove his will into the very fabric of the fight.
Bruce didn’t just hit Darkseid.
He rewrote Darkseid’s pain into the structure of the battle.
Every movement chained together, unrelenting.
Darkseid, the Prime, the inevitable, the devourer of dimensions, was reduced to defense.
And it wasn't enough.
Bruce created an infinity-constructed chain and wrapped it around Darkseid’s arms, pinning him midair. The chains glowed with Tribunal Law, woven from the essence of balance itself.
"You talk about endings," Bruce growled, grabbing Darkseid by the throat.
"You don't even understand what ending means."
He lifted Darkseid and slammed him down into the void-ground with such force that the entire reality they fought in folded like paper under a hammer. Cracks spread outward, shattering the already broken dimension into a field of floating ruins.
Bruce hovered above, a living sun of judgment, and raised his hand.
A new weapon formed.
Forged from Infinity Power and Radion, blessed by Tribunal Law... a spear of pure consequence.
The Judgment Spear.
It shimmered like a star compressed into a blade. Every thread of its being was designed for one thing.
End a god.
Bruce aimed it at Darkseid, who struggled against the chains, roaring in defiance.
"You think this is death," Bruce said, voice cold and final. "But this is justice."
He launched the spear.
It tore through reality with a shriek of a billion dying stars.
"DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE ME, MORTAL!" Darkseid unleashed the full force of the Omega Effect, a black-red tidal wave of annihilation roaring toward Bruce's attack.
The two forces collided.
For a moment, everything froze.
Then, with a scream that echoed across infinite planes, the Judgment Spear pierced through the Omega wave, through Darkseid’s chest...
Darkseid staggered.
He looked down.
A big hole!
Bruce blinked before him.
His hands, burning with the raw power of Infinity, Tribunal Law, and the full might of the Ten Rings, closed onto Darkseid’s wounded form.
One hand gripped cracked, divine ribs.
The other, torn, shredded flesh.
"ARRRGGG!!" Bruce roared, the sound less a human cry and more the thundering birth of a new cosmic law.
And pulled.
There was no mercy.
No hesitation.
The sound that followed wasn’t just physical, it was the wail of a god’s entire existence breaking apart. Reality itself buckled around them, the frozen void collapsing inward as Bruce ripped Darkseid’s skeleton clean from his flesh, tearing apart the god’s divine structure at the atomic, conceptual level.
Darkseid’s physical body collapsed instantly, his obsidian armor clattering into molten slag across the shattered ground.
His soul, vast, terrible, shrieking with rage, ripped itself free from the remains, trying to flee, a roiling black mass that twisted through the void, desperate to escape annihilation.
Bruce’s eyes snapped open fully, Infinity light pouring from them. The Soul energy flared around him, an aura of perfect, unbreakable authority.
"No."
Bruce reached out, and the Soul Stone’s energy expanded like a net woven of starlight and judgment. It wrapped around Darkseid’s fleeing spirit, ignoring its desperate struggles, ignoring its howling.
The soul tried to shatter itself, tried to fragment into infinite pieces across the multiverse.
Bruce simply tightened his grip.
The Soul Net compressed.
Smaller.
Denser.
Darkseid’s essence screamed again as Bruce crushed his spirit into a compact, burning orb of black-red light.
Still trying to resist.
Still refusing to die.
Bruce raised his hand.
The orb floated above his palm, thrashing and flickering, trying to reform.
He summoned the Judgment Spear back to his hand.
Without a word, Bruce thrust the spear through the trapped soul, pinning it between dimensions, into the bleeding cracks of the multiverse.
The Tribunal's voice echoed in the dying skies:
"Judgment rendered."
The pinned soul shrieked one last time.
Then it collapsed into itself.
Imploded.
Gone.
Darkseid Prime was no more.
Not defeated.
Not sealed.
Not trapped.
Erased.
Completely.
Bruce lowered his arm.
The battlefield was silent.
The fractured plane trembled as it began to collapse fully now, no longer sustained by either combatant’s will. Reality itself would soon erase this place from existence.
Bruce stood alone at the heart of it all, surrounded by crumbling stars and dying echoes.
He then flew down and sat on the floating shard of broken asteroid, the vast emptiness stretching around him. His breathing was slow. Calm.
He looked down at his hands. Cracks spiderwebbed along his skin, golden light leaking from the fractures. His armor was breaking apart. Not shattered by Darkseid, but dissolving, atom by atom.
The power that had fueled his final victory... the Living Tribunal's fragment, the Infinity energy threaded with Judgment... it was eating him from the inside out. His very existence, now incompatible with the multiverse, was fading.
And he accepted it.
Above him, the black void was bleeding into soft color. A sun? No, not the sun of any world he knew, but something deeper was rising, casting warm, final rays across the broken dimension.
Bruce smiled faintly. It was a lonely, sad smile, but a satisfied one.
The war was over. The monster was gone.
The people he loved would live.
He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the silence of victory wash over him.
Then a soft sound... almost like the rustle of wind through a forgotten hallway. A portal opened behind him, spinning into being with a soft sigh of energy.
Boots crunched against the floating rock.
Bruce opened his eyes and didn’t turn. He didn’t need to.
"Strange," he said, voice low but steady.
Stephen Strange, his cloak torn and burnt at the edges, floated down beside him. His face was weary, more human than Bruce had ever seen it. He said nothing at first, only looked at Bruce... the man who had done what no god, no champion, no cosmic force had ever achieved.
"Ha... You look like shit, Strange," Bruce chuckled.
"I’m sorry," Strange finally said, voice rough. "For everything. But there was no other way."
Bruce chuckled softly, the sound dry and cracked. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.
"It doesn’t matter anymore," he said. His gaze remained fixed on the rising light. "No one’s going to remember me."
Strange swallowed hard, his hands curling slightly at his sides. He could see it—Bruce’s body was unraveling, pieces of him scattering like stardust with every passing second.
"The Tribunal’s judgment..." Bruce continued. "The price for wielding their authority. Existence in the multiverse becomes impossible. The timeline... forgets."
Strange closed his eyes, guilt bleeding from him like a wound. "You don't deserve this."
Bruce turned his head slightly, just enough to glance at him.
"I never fought for memory," he said. "I fought so Morgan could build a future without fear. I fought so Harley could laugh without pretending. So Selina could live without running. So Diana could dream again. So Pam could joke without hiding pain. So Kara could fly free. So Hela could find balance. So the kids... all of them... could grow up. Everyone... will be ok."
He smiled again, a little wider this time, though a tear traced down his cracked cheek.
"I fought for them. Not for a legacy. Not for a name."
The light from the rising sun grew brighter. His body shed more pieces, little particles of golden dust swirling upward. His fingertips began to blur, dissolve.
"I was never a god," Bruce whispered. "I was just a man who chose to stay standing when everything else fell."
Strange stepped closer, almost reaching out, but stopped himself. He knew. Nothing could be done now. No magic could bind him. No artifact could save him.
Bruce stood slowly. His body shimmered, flickering between existence and oblivion.
He turned toward Strange fully, the light haloing him.
"Promise me," Bruce said quietly. "Protect them."
"I swear it," Strange whispered.
Bruce nodded once. Then he turned his gaze upward to the newborn light, his expression calm, unafraid.
The portal behind Strange shimmered again. More figures stepped through it now.
Selina. Harley. Morgan. Hela. Diana. Sue. Ami. Kara. Jennifer. Pamela. Nat. Clint. Martha. Thomas. Damien. Elissa. Talia. Nyssa. Ariel. [And everyone... His friends and family...]
They had come.
Somehow, even as the universe tried to forget, they remembered.
They couldn't reach him—the rules of existence wouldn't allow it. But they stood there, silent, eyes burning, hearts breaking, bearing witness.
Harley tried to run forward, tears spilling down her face, but Selina caught her, holding her back, shaking her head.
Bruce saw them.
And he smiled one last time.
It was a smile full of love. Full of pride. Full of peace.
Then he turned back toward the light.
His body dissolved fully now, streams of golden dust trailing behind him like a comet.
And with a final step forward, Tony Stark... Bruce Wayne... Jack Lance... the Champion of the Multiverse...
Was gone.
The light swallowed him.
The void went silent.
And a new dawn broke.
A future he gave everything to protect.
Even if no one would remember the name of the man who made it possible.
They would live.
And for Bruce...
That was enough.
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AN: Should I end it here? Or, bring Bruce back? But if you ask me, this was the OG ending I had in mind. A little rushed, I know. Let me know in the comment.
Comments
FieryD
Bring him back. He deserve a good closure.
Ladus
Bring him back
